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“Humanity has opened the gates to hell,” warned Secretary-General António Guterres in an impassioned speech to politicians, business leaders and activists on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2023, warning of the dire consequences of increasingly extreme weather events. “Our concern is that all climate action will be dwarfed by the scale of the challenge as humanity heads towards a temperature rise of 2.8°C.”
An appeal to the world that has long been inscribed at the heart of our festival. It is our duty to preserve the poetry of creation for our children. On the fundamental issues of urbanisation, biodiversity, natural resources, pollution and global warming, we will try to use images to provide, if not solutions, then at least food for thought. Therefore, in our seventh festival year, we are showing the work of the great masters of environmental photography: Nazli Abbaspour, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Yasuhoshi Chiba, Joana Choumali, David Doubilet und Jennifer Hayes, Nadia Ferroukhi, Sacha Goldberger, Richard Ladkani, Lucas Lenci, Luca Locatelli, Pascal Maitre, Beth Moon, Maxime Riché, Sebastião Salgado, Alain Schroeder, Vee Speers, Brent Stirton, Lorraine Turci, David Turnley, Peter Turnley und Cássio Vasconcellos.
“We all need Eden as a horizon,” writes Cyril Drouhet in his essay in the festival catalogue. “There was a time when we had a rainbow in our heads: We believed in the future, in progress, our dreams were full of utopias. In the third millennium, this colour has turned grey. But life needs radiant colours like in photography to enchant the world again. That is the challenge of the coming years and the challenge of our festival.”
This year, the bilateral photography project of the Morbihan schools in Brittany and Lower Austria is also dedicated to the theme of “Nature as heritage”. We are giving young people the opportunity to express their ideas on the challenges of today and, above all, of tomorrow: How can we shape social models to preserve our unique world for our children?
“We have the choice to use the gift of our lives to make the world a better place,” Jane Goodall is convinced. Martin Parr, whom the festival will honour with the first Lifetime Achievement Award, is certainly in this spirit of preserving rays of hope for humanity. And Norbert Span shows us in his pictures why snow crystals are the “jewels of the sky”.
The exhibition of photographs by professional photographers from Lower Austria and the “Director’s Cut” exhibition by jury president Michel Comte from CEWE’s “Our World is Beautiful”, the world’s largest photo competition with over 500,000 images from 170 countries, will round off the festival, as will the look back at 2023 in the images of artist in residence Ina Künne, whose pictures will be accompanied by texts by 2022 Thomas Jorda Award winner Raphaela Edelbauer. A very special visual highlight is the exhibition “The Human Footprint”, images from orbit, prepared by Gerald Mansberger and Markus Eisl.
